For me, the name Dante conjured up two images. The first was the epic depictions of Hell from Dante's Inferno, with people burning for their sins. The second image was a sexual depiction. I don't know where it came from, but as far back as I can remember, I had always associated the name Dante with a beautiful and sexy man. I'd imagined a dark-haired, dark-eyed, gorgeous lothario, the type who could capture a woman's heart with just one look. Dante was the Fabio of my generation, the heartthrob that got women's hearts beating fast, made us want this man to rip our clothes off and to throw us onto the bed. Little did I know that the Dante that walked into my life was very different from the one I'd imagined. Oh, he was dark-haired, dark-eyed, gorgeous, even a lothario ... just ... he wasn't a man. He was a fifteen-year-old boy who was going to send me to the Hell his namesake had written about. And I was his teacher.

DBC Pierre's second novel charts the unlikely meeting between East and West that follows Ludmila Derev's appearance on a Russian brides website. Determined to save her family from starvation in the face of marauding Gnez troops, Ludmila's journey into the world and womanhood is an odyssey of sour wit, even sourer vodka, and a Soviet tractor probably running on goat's piss. Thousands of miles to the West, the Heath twins are separated after 33 years conjoined at the abdomen. Released for the first time from an institution rumoured to have been founded for an illegitimate child of Charles II, they are suddenly plunged into a round-the-clock world churning with opportunity, rowdy with the chatter of freedom, democracy, self-empowerment and sex. A wild and raucous picaresque dripping with flavours of British bacon and nasty Russian vodka, Ludmila's Broken English is a tale of tango-ing twins on a journey into the unknown. A ride so outrageously improbable it just may happen, DBC Pierre's second novel confirms his place in the ranks of today's most original storytellers.

The English language in the Renaissance was in many ways a collection of competing Englishes. Paula Blank investigates the representation of alternative vernaculars - the dialects of early modern English - in both linguistic and literary works of the period. Blank argues that Renaissance authors such as Spenser, Shakespeare and Jonson helped to construct the idea of a national language, variously known as 'true' English or 'pure' English or the 'King's English', by distinguishing its dialects - and sometimes by creating those dialects themselves. Broken English reveals how the Renaissance 'invention' of dialect forged modern alliances of language and cultural authority. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Renaissance studies and Renaissance English literature. It will also make fascinating reading for anyone with an interest in the history of English language.

Essays, performance scripts, and interviews by one of America's emergin art critics.

Why were so many religious images and objects broken and damaged in the course of the Reformation? Margaret Aston's magisterial new book charts the conflicting imperatives of destruction and rebuilding throughout the English Reformation from the desecration of images, rails and screens to bells, organs and stained glass windows. She explores the motivations of those who smashed images of the crucifixion in stained glass windows and who pulled down crosses and defaced symbols of the Trinity. She shows that destruction was part of a methodology of religious revolution designed to change people as well as places and to forge in the long term new generations of new believers. Beyond blanked walls and whited windows were beliefs and minds impregnated by new modes of religious learning. Idol-breaking with its emphasis on the treacheries of images fundamentally transformed not only Anglican ways of worship but also of seeing, hearing and remembering.